Robert Treat Paine

Robert Treat Paine (11 March 1731-11 May 1814) was a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the US Declaration of Independence.

Biography
Robert Treat Paine was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1731, and he graduated from Harvard College in 1749. He taught school at Boston Latin and in Lunenburg, and he also travelled to the Carolinas, the Azores, Spain, and Greenland as a merchant. In 1757, he was admitted to the bar, and he moved to Taunton in 1761. In 1768, he was a delegate to the provincial convention in Boston, and he conducted the prosecution of Captain Thomas Preston and his British soldiers following the Boston massacre. Paine served on the Massachusetts General Court from 1773 to 1774, in the Provincial Congress from 1774 to 1775, and as a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776. In 1776, he was one of the signers of the US Declaration of Independence. He returned to Massachusetts in December 1776 and was a member of the committee that drafted the state constitution in 1780. From 1777 to 1790, he served as Massachusetts Attorney General, and he prosecuted the treason trials following Shays' Rebellion. He served as a justice of the State Supreme Court from 1790 to 1804, when he retired, and he died in 1814.